The present application relates to application hosting on a resource limited device.
There is a continually increasing number of mobile devices in use today, such as mobile telephones, PDAs with wireless communication capabilities and two-way pagers. Software applications which run on these devices increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the connectivity to a network in order to provide timely and useful services to users. However, due to the restricted resources of some devices, and the complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing and maintaining the software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Applications are generally represented in different forms as suits the environment in which they are evaluated. For example, a human may evaluate an application more readily when it contains symbols and descriptive content that are familiar to the reader. This description of an application can be small in size due to the language of expression. One disadvantage is that the processor of a device executing the application cannot recognize human readable form and therefore produces a complied machine readable format. The processor typically evaluates an application in a native format. In order to permit evaluation by a machine the original application content must be subjected to a conversion process. During this process the representation of the application content can grow in size. In this state the content requires additional overhead in terms of storage space, but provides the better performance for execution.
Systems and methods are provided for flexible application hosting to obviate or mitigate at least some of the above presented disadvantages.